At RealClearPolicy No Labels presents five facts on the shortage of truckdrivers:
- According to the American Truckers Association, the U.S. currently faces an all-time high shortage of 80,000 truckers.
- Four million job postings for trucking positions in 2021 required a Commercial Driver’s License at a minimum — and many also sought past professional experience.
- Four out of five U.S. truckers are over age 45 — and nearly one in four are over age 55.
- Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020.
- The Transportation Department projected last year that ground freight totals will rise by 50% by 2050 to 28.7 billion tons.
Here’s my question. When what passes for industrial policy in the U. S. over the period of the last 30 years has been to send everyone to college, preaching that the only way of getting a job that will enable people to maintain a decent standard of living is to go to college in search of a job that requires a college degree (or, increasingly, an advanced degree), what do they expect?
I suggest doing more local manufacturing and reducing interstate transport. Better yet hyperlocal. We should be doing a lot more with additive manufacturing. Do more local deliveries with autonomous vehicles.
When you have 92% turnover, the problem isn’t employees, it’s employers, the pay, the expectations of the job, failure to provide training etc.
“Do more local deliveries with autonomous vehicles.”
Long haul – the bit where you follow the interstate for 500-1000 miles – is easier to automate, and the part of the industry that is least attractive, especially to anyone who wants a family life.
We already have those—they’re called “railroads”. More than a century of bad regulation has practically ruined them.
Two government-driven impositions on the trucking industry are the myriad of regulations stapled onto the truck drivers’ workdays, and vaccine mandates which are weeding out the labor force – like they are doing to every labor force. Here in CA, the regulations are especially onerous, coupled with the high price of gas, it’s destroying the independent truck drivers.
I am subject to random and annual drug and alcohol testing.
Annual DOT required physical,
Background checks, and have had to have my fingerprints run through a Federal database.
If I had a record of any kind I would not have this job.
Pays $16.25/hour.
Home daily.
There are lots and lots of able candidates who cannot qualify.
Rail, yes, more and more I’m seeing 55 foot loaded trailers,
UPS, FedEx, big name carriers, on train flatbed cars.
“I suggest doing more local manufacturing and reducing interstate transport. Better yet hyperlocal. We should be doing a lot more with additive manufacturing. Do more local deliveries with autonomous vehicles.”
Aside from economies of scale, which is what the industrial revolution of the 18th/19th Century was all about, the economy is still controlled by Wall Street financiers, not manufacturers, and they are still selling off US manufacturing assets. If you want to change that, a lot of Wall Street types, maybe all, will have to be removed. Roots causes and all that.
“…controlled by Wall Street financiers, not manufacturers, and they are still selling off US manufacturing assets.”
Interesting. I’m trying to recall the last time a financier pointed a gun at us and told us to sell our stock certificates, or either our signatures or our brains would be on the purchase and sale agreement………. That recollection seems to escape me at the moment.
And money managers are not telling Apple to manufacture in China. Apple is.
I don’t know what the experience of others has been but mine has been that economies of scale are almost never linear or exponential and much more commonly logistic.
Apple is an interesting case, Drew. IMO the evidence supports the view that Apple began manufacturing in China not to obtain economies but to gain access to the Chinese market. I’ve posted on this subject before. Whatever economies Apple is realizing by manufacturing are actually pretty small and may be accounting artifacts, i.e. if you don’t factor in transportation costs, opportunity costs, etc.
Now, of course, Apple has other, better reasons to manufacture in China. Their production engineering is generally considered better than ours at this point which is something I warned about 30 years ago.
As to the balance of your comment, bob, my experience has been that people are strongly predisposed to do what they’ve been trained to do. Engineers engineer. MBAs financialize. It’s something else I was pointing out the risks of 30-40 years ago. The only great company I can think that was built by MBAs is Amazon and it’s sort of a freak. For a decade or so it was a IPO searching for a business model. It sort of oopsed into its present business model which is only tangentially related to the business it started out in.
I don’t honestly believe that Amazon’s experience could be replicated today.
Dave
“IMO the evidence supports the view that Apple began manufacturing in China not to obtain economies but to gain access to the Chinese market.”
Exactly my (more general) point, as well as costs. This is what I’m really saying: Just spewing words like financialization, Wall Street financiers is easy cheap stuff for the bar room crowd. But its nonsense. Finance and manufacturing can coexist in an economy. (must, actually) And to discount finance will render you just as emasculated as discounting manufacturing, as we have done at so great a cost, which is where I suspect BSykes is really going. If memory serves, BS is a civil engineering prof. I inherently have a soft spot. But as I’ve said, I call them like I see them.
And to your comment about engineers engineering and MBA’s financing. Perhaps. But as you know, I was trained (2 degrees in blood and guts engineering) and spent 6 years as a classic process engineer. Cost, quality, productivity. But then on to financing, and then ownership. I realize that’s atypical. But I see all angles. I don’t think very many people really understand what “Wall Street Finance” really means.
Here’s an open challenge. Who here can really define what the various disciplines in “Wall Street Finance” really are. Not superficial descriptions. What are they? What purpose do they serve? (And to make it easier I just skip corporate finance like treasury).
I bet there is only 1. And even there I wonder if they truly know.
Where I think we should agree is that cost control and appropriate organization of borrowing are vital components of running a business. But no company has ever cost reduced its way to greatness.
Consider the newspaper industry as just one example. IMO leveraged buyouts have been one of the major factors that have reduced it to a shadow of its former self. The tactic is just not appropriate for newspapers. They don’t have the ability to bear the debt. There used to be literally thousands of different newspaper companies. Now that’s reduced to a handful and they are struggling. Consolidation via leveraged buyouts is my shorthand explanation of what has happened.